Online advertising involves the use of the Internet and other communications networks to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers. Online advertising includes email marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, web banner advertising, and mobile advertising. As with most other advertising media, online advertising involves a publisher, who integrates advertisements into the content delivered to the consumer, and an advertiser, who provides the advertisements to be displayed on the publisher's content. In recent years, online advertising has become a large and growing industry, with U.S. Internet advertising revenue hitting a historic high of $20 billion for the first half of 2013 alone.
With the increasing availability of mobile computing devices, including smart phones, tablets, personal information devices and wearable computers, the online advertising industry has moved to mobile computing devices. As consumers surf the Web on their cellular telephones or Internet enabled tablets, they are served ads in the same way they encounter ads on standard desktop computers. Further, consumers are accustomed to receiving text messages on their mobile telephones advertising products and services. One area where online advertising is lacking, however, is targeting of ads.
Targeted advertising is a type of advertising whereby advertisements are placed so as to reach consumers based on various traits such as demographics, psychographics, behavioral variables, product purchase history, etc. Targeted advertising systems serve ads directly based on demographic, psychographic, or behavioral attributes associated with the consumer exposed to the ad. Most recently, the geographic location of consumers has been used to determine which ads should be used to advertise to certain consumers. Often, GPS on a consumer's mobile phone is used to obtain a consumer's location. GPS, however, lacks the type of accuracy to pinpoint the location of consumers in dense areas, such as shopping malls, big cities and other densely packed locales.
Another area where online advertising is lacking is the ability to deliver those ads to consumers in a usable form. Consumers often see ads on their computers and mobile phones and desire to use those ads when purchasing the advertised product or service, especially when the ad advertises a discount or other benefit. But usually, consumers view said ads in a passive form and do not further interact with the ad, other than reading it. This limits the effect of the ad and its usability to consumers when making purchases involving the very products or services promoted in the ad.
Therefore, a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art, and more specifically, there is a need for a more efficient and time sensitive system and method for targeting and disseminating ads over a communications network.